Once Upon a Time...

February 03, 2016

Damn

This morning, I crawled out of my sick bed and, after greeting my sweet Sasha, playing with her for a few minutes and then feeding her breakfast, I reread what I posted here last month.

As I thought again about the writing I would love to be doing, and how my awful health continues to make that all but impossible, I started crying. A few of you have told me how much you miss my writing, and how you long to hear my "unique voice" (not my phrase) again. I'm enormously grateful for those messages; they mean a great deal to me. How do you think I myself feel? For the last ten years or so, my writing here has been my primary activity. In many ways, it's how I define myself, how I express my soul, for want of a better word. When I'm unable to write, I feel as if part of me vanishes with each day that passes. I wonder how much of my "self" is left now. So I am filled with despair, anger, frustration, sadness. And I cry.

I'm only able to write these short, "begging" posts because my terror of being unable to pay the rent, and then being evicted, briefly overwhelms even that despair and sadness. But that terror is losing some of its power over me, so these posts come closer and closer to the deadline for rent payment. I suppose that someday, I may just let it go, and proceed to homelessness and the end of me. I occasionally think it would be much easier to stumble into the middle of the street and get hit by a truck. Don't worry: I no longer experience depression that fixates on suicidal thoughts. I wrestled that demon to the ground some years ago. only because of Alice Miller's work, which finally enabled me to understand and conquer it.

But the profound sadness remains, and the wretched health. I'm still trying to work through it. If anything saves me, to any extent, it will be my ability to write. As I read those words from a month ago, I thought: "If only I felt physically the way I did on my better days even two or three years ago. Just think what I could get done!" That's when the tears come.

I have done some work in the past month. Not a lot of writing, but to compose the essays I've planned, I have to read (and sometimes reread) a number of articles and some books. Those people who have read me for several years will know that I don't simply put down whatever random thoughts happen to be rattling around the vasty spaces of my brain, such as it is. My strong preference is to offer essays grounded in facts and research. I once heard a writer say, with regard to nonfiction, that you are only ready to write one essay when you know enough to write at least ten essays on the same subject. I've always thought that proportion is about right; it has certainly been true in my experience. By contrast, think of the posts offered by many writers and bloggers, where it is painfully obvious that they are writing at the outermost edge of their knowledge and understanding (and frequently exceeding whatever understanding they have, when it's clear they don't know what the hell they're talking about).

As to the current cause of my practical terror: I am a few hundrd dollars short of the February rent. If at all possible, I should have the rent payment ready by the end of tomorrow, which will enable me to get the payment to the landlord on Friday (the last day before the rent is late). And I'm still trying to gather sufficient funds to get Sasha to the vet. I wasn't able to raise enough last month, which is attested to by the fact that I don't have the rend money I need. My anxiety (and guilt) about Sasha is doing nothing to help me overcome the other problems. She still seems fine, so I hope nothing terrible is happening.

I would be more grateful than I can say if any of you still think this is a cause worth supporting, looking to the day, hopefully sooner rather than later, when I can focus long enough to put some articles together. I try every day; this battle is one of the hardest I've ever fought. And let me offer my deepest thanks to all those who have made donations recently. I'm still here only because of you.

Many thanks for listening, and for your understanding. Now back to my battle.

P.S. I can't resist saying that, in addition to my wanting to offer some thoughts about the Trump candidacy, I also want to spend some time considering Ted Cruz. He is one of the creepiest public figures I've seen in my life, which is not short at this point. He's also very, very scary. I'm astounded that people don't recoil from him in terror. But a lot of people don't, which is very interesting and worrying in itself. Never fear: this idiotic presidential election is not one of the major subjects I want to write about, although some of my themes intersect with issues related to Trump, Cruz and the rest of this group of mass murderers, mass murderer wannabes, liars and criminals. They are all deeply disturbed individuals; no one who wants to be president is remotely close to what I consider normal and healthy. And many people also fail to understand that, which is similarly interesting. And extremely worrying.